This blog is about journeys—of every
conceivable kind. It’s about musical journeys and culinary journeys and educational
journeys and spiritual journeys and health journeys and career journeys and
literary journeys and relationship journeys and metaphorical journeys and, of
course, travel journeys. This blog is about the incremental steps we take in
our passages from one physical state to another or from one emotional state to
another. It’s about the wishing you were there and the getting there and the being
there. It’s about looking forward and looking backward. It’s about the uphill treks
and the downhill stumbles.
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American Toad
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It’s about beginnings and endings, like the journey
the toads in my yard take from strings of eggs floating in the pond, to tadpoles
swimming, to tiny hoppers leaping through the grass and into the path of the
lawn mower. Or, a squirrel’s flight, suspended from a hawk’s talons, to its dreadful
doom.
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| "Supermoon," June 22, 2013 |
It’s about our awesome, gruesome daily spins and the moon's monthly trips around the earth and the earth's annual trips around
the sun. Every moment—every step—is a journey. Please come along and explore some
of them with me; please share some your own.
Whether you’re venturing to a foreign country thousands
of miles from home or are simply crossing the closest state line, when you
embark on a journey to an unfamiliar land, you carry with you an amalgamation
of the events, experiences, people, and places you have encountered throughout
your life. In her compilation of travel essays entitled We Never Travel Alone: A Collection of Essays on Journeys Near and Far,
R. A. Voss presents readers with thirteen stories that recount her childhood
excursions throughout her home state of Iowa as well as her travels to
countries situated on the opposite side of the globe. Using her past encounters
with various people and places as a guide, Voss touches on topics that range
from history and family ancestry to equal rights and environmental
sustainability. Poignant and insightful, her essays highlight the way such
experiences have shaped her perceptions of new places she has visited and new
people she has met throughout her life so far.
From Buttermilk Road—an essay that details the daytrip
Voss’s family took to a local waterway in rural Iowa and sheds lights on the
environmental dangers posed by DDT in the 1960s—to Violence Exposed at a
Buddhist Monastery—an essay that describes the day Voss and her husband
witnessed a surprising event in Japan—the stories told in We Never Travel Alone
crisscross the genres of travel, memoir, and nature writing, and run the gamut
from lighthearted and comical to somber and self-reflective. Due to the
descriptive nature of the essays, lovers of travel writing will feel as though
they are embarking on a journey of their very own as they follow in Voss’s
footsteps and rediscover her past experiences alongside her.
